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Thread: Agi stk

  1. #1

    Agi stk

    Anyone else dabble in stk? I mainly use it for aircraft but its a very powerful tool if you look into it even for prototyping.

  2. #2
    FlyingRon's Avatar
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    I used to work with them professionally (in fact, we were considering buying the company at one point). They threw great parties.

  3. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by FlyingRon View Post
    I used to work with them professionally (in fact, we were considering buying the company at one point). They threw great parties.
    That sounds interesting mind telling us a little more about it or is it one of those things that can't really be disclosed?

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    rwanttaja's Avatar
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    Ha, I was thinking STK: "Satellite Tool Kit," a program I used a bit in my space-ops days. Didn't realized they'd branched out. "Systems Tool Kit," now.

    We were always doing weird things that STK couldn't model, so I ended up writing my own mission simulations.

    Ron Wanttaja

  5. #5
    Yea it's pretty robust now my only issue is scale of provided models is off. So if you bing map to a physical run way turn it into an area and try to launch a plane off it it looks wayyy to big. So scaling in blender to make it look right. I'll get access to the more advanced stuff during my cert training so I'm gonna line up a bunch of projects for that full aviator lmao.

  6. #6
    FlyingRon's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Drake Firebreed View Post
    That sounds interesting mind telling us a little more about it or is it one of those things that can't really be disclosed?
    For a while the guy who ran the company, Paul Graziani, threw elaborate Christmas parties and user group meetings. The user group meeting was the only one I've ever been to that had meals included and give away ice cream in the afternoon. All free as a customer.
    I went to one Xmas party at the Cosmos Club in DC and another at the National Portrait gallery. At the time our little company had been bought up by another private equity group with the goal of taking a lot of related companies and forcing them to work together to come up with greater synergies. We had two companies that had spent a lot of time doing high performance large scale image analysis, and photogrammetry, one that did a lot of SIGINT stuff, one that did a lot of three-D city modelling (think ways to determine what a sniper could hit from a given location or vice versa), and one that did automated feature and lidar extraction and a couple of smaller groups. AGI was a prime choice because the STK and the related toolkits is the mathematical model you need to precisely locate anything moving (satellites, high altitude aircraft, etc...) so you can use that to correlate multiple sensors. Being the senior technical guy, I was often called to evaluate if the technology was worth buying (and a couple of times to see if I thought there were IP conflicts in the works). I thought AGI would have been a good mix (and the company had a good internal attitude, they have washers and dryers in the facility so the engineers can have clean clothes while working long hours, etc...). We didn't end up buying them because the President of the conglomerate that AGI was a bit too liberal in their spending compared to their revenue and passed.

    I liked Graziani. I was always impressed with how good a memory he had for faces. I'd not seen him in a year and he not only recognized me but knew just what our company was doing. The last time was right after Textron bought us and he asked me how that was going.

    I guess he got the last laugh. AGI still seems to be going strong and Textron has pretty much run the company they purchased into oblivion.

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